The Cathedral and the Bizarre • Hacker News Board

Re: The Cathedral and the Bizarre

#51

Post by eindiran » Sun, Dec 15, 2019, 2:14 AM UTC

Koshkin wrote: post #19

sdenton4 wrote: post #17

"No mathematical theorem, no enjoyable novel, no work of art of any importance, have ever been produced by a herd. I fail to see why innovative software ought to play by a different set of rules." Nobody tell this guy about Bourbaki... He's also probably never enjoyed a movie.

Well, to be fair, a textbook is not a theorem or an enjoyable novel... Also, a movie is not made by a “herd” (unless one thinks of a company as a herd.) Wikipedia would be a better example.

The Elements of Mathematics volumes weren't exactly textbooks and contained novel proofs. Also, the Bourbaki group published some papers containing novel theorems. For example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourbaki%E2%80%93Witt_theorem

Re: The Cathedral and the Bizarre

#52

Post by coldtea » Sun, Dec 15, 2019, 2:16 AM UTC

sdenton4 wrote: post #17

"No mathematical theorem, no enjoyable novel, no work of art of any importance, have ever been produced by a herd. I fail to see why innovative software ought to play by a different set of rules." Nobody tell this guy about Bourbaki... He's also probably never enjoyed a movie.

Bourbaki summed, did not innovate.

Movies are also team work only in the sense of many people working under the vision of a single person: the director. But that's also true for any system designed by 1-2-3 people where 100s also work on.

Re: The Cathedral and the Bizarre

#53

Post by coldtea » Sun, Dec 15, 2019, 2:19 AM UTC

sildur wrote: post #18

sdenton4 wrote: post #17

"No mathematical theorem, no enjoyable novel, no work of art of any importance, have ever been produced by a herd. I fail to see why innovative software ought to play by a different set of rules." Nobody tell this guy about Bourbaki... He's also probably never enjoyed a movie.

A novel also is produced by a “herd”. There are a lot of people involved. People that make suggestions, corrections, the editor... It’s not a single person effort.

The single person is the one who does the conception and creation.

That proof-readers, editors, etc work on it too is inconsequential.

TFA didn't say more than one person can't contribute something or work an artistic project. It said that one or a very few people have the direction and the overall command and vision -- e.g. the opposite of "community process" or "design by committee".

Re: The Cathedral and the Bizarre

#54

Post by ThrowawayR2 » Sun, Dec 15, 2019, 2:20 AM UTC

ohazi wrote: post #41

It sounds like this guy has some sort of axe to grind, but he's wrong. His argument rests on the claim that "most open source code is poor or unusable." When most people refer to Open Source Software, they're referring to serious projects like the Linux kernel, Apache, PostreSQL, Firefox, etc. They're not referring to random crap on Github. The serious projects are actually better than their closed-source counterpart…

Ironically, he anticipated this objection, which many people beyond the parent poster are making, and answered it in the paragraph that contains:

"... Open source users will admit that a lot of open source is buggy abandonware. However they argue that this really does not matter since some small significant fraction is really quite good and that's the stuff we should use. ..."

Finding and dissecting the paragraph that contains the above sentence is left as an exercise to the reader.

Re: The Cathedral and the Bizarre

#55

Post by iudqnolq » Sun, Dec 15, 2019, 2:36 AM UTC

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #54

ohazi wrote: post #41

It sounds like this guy has some sort of axe to grind, but he's wrong. His argument rests on the claim that "most open source code is poor or unusable." When most people refer to Open Source Software, they're referring to serious projects like the Linux kernel, Apache, PostreSQL, Firefox, etc. They're not referring to random crap on Github. The serious projects are actually better than their closed-source counterpart…

Ironically, he anticipated this objection, which many people beyond the parent poster are making, and answered it in the paragraph that contains: " ... Open source users will admit that a lot of open source is buggy abandonware. However they argue that this really does not matter since some small significant fraction is really quite good and that's the stuff we should use. ... " Finding and dissecting the paragraph t…

As far as I can tell, he makes a weak argument by analogy

> This lesser-known fact is masked by the isolated points fallacy. The isolated points fallacy consists in taking the high scoring points on a graph and plotting your line on the basis of them. Hence open source champions wheel out the standard examples of success - Open Office, Wordpress and Red Hat Linux (we'll look at why some of these have succeeded later) - ignoring the vast sea of floating half submerged buggy and abandoned projects (over 120,000) that litter Github. It is the sort of technique Mugabe would have used for TV. If you're accused of starving the country, wheel out a handful of well nourished kids for people to see. 'Look, our country is fine; see how healthy these kids are'. Out in the slums the less fortunate die of cholera.

Re: The Cathedral and the Bizarre

#56

Post by iudqnolq » Sun, Dec 15, 2019, 2:45 AM UTC

dwohnitmok wrote: post #13

It is perhaps useful to understand where the author is coming from. The author is very critical of open source on the whole. He has a series of articles detailing criticisms of open source software. http://marktarver.com/problems.html (The Problems of Open Source) http://marktarver.com/open.html (In Praise of Closed Source) He is the inventor of the Qi (later Shen) language (essentially a Lisp dialect with a configur…

HN makes an appearance:

> This is the time when reddit made an appearance. I blessed the Shen subreddit because I thought that reddit was some polite ladies bookclub - obviously showing my ignorance of it. It is nothing of the sort of course and some of its most vicious sites like Coontown - the reddit for racists only recently closed - shows what is so often like. Reddit is a shit hole; and to a lesser degree so are SlashDot, and Hacker News.

> Unfortunately some members of the Shen group, imbibing the mindshare poison, gave much power away to the opinions on reddit.

> The OS fanatics relished their power to bully and shame and people used to mail me and say 'You need to say something because XYZ has said such and such on reddit'. I did on occasion call such people 'complete prats', but really this was whack-a-mole because the supply of arseholes was unending.

Re: The Cathedral and the Bizarre

#57

Post by yjftsjthsd-h » Sun, Dec 15, 2019, 2:47 AM UTC

ohazi wrote: post #41

It sounds like this guy has some sort of axe to grind, but he's wrong. His argument rests on the claim that "most open source code is poor or unusable." When most people refer to Open Source Software, they're referring to serious projects like the Linux kernel, Apache, PostreSQL, Firefox, etc. They're not referring to random crap on Github. The serious projects are actually better than their closed-source counterpart…

> most open source code is poor or unusable

Is there any special reason to believe that closed source is any better? If we can count the sea of abandonware on Github, then we get to count the mountain of "interesting" code that remains internal to large companies, or worse, the stuff that actually got released on unsuspecting customers.

Re: The Cathedral and the Bizarre

#58

Post by ThrowawayR2 » Sun, Dec 15, 2019, 3:00 AM UTC

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #57

ohazi wrote: post #41

It sounds like this guy has some sort of axe to grind, but he's wrong. His argument rests on the claim that "most open source code is poor or unusable." When most people refer to Open Source Software, they're referring to serious projects like the Linux kernel, Apache, PostreSQL, Firefox, etc. They're not referring to random crap on Github. The serious projects are actually better than their closed-source counterpart…

> most open source code is poor or unusable Is there any special reason to believe that closed source is any better? If we can count the sea of abandonware on Github, then we get to count the mountain of "interesting" code that remains internal to large companies, or worse, the stuff that actually got released on unsuspecting customers.

Generally, a business pays developers to write software that it expects to be put to immediate use, which means that most of the time it functions, at least minimally. I'm sure exceptions exist, of course.

FLOSS abandonware has no such constraint.

Re: The Cathedral and the Bizarre

#59

Post by zakki » Sun, Dec 15, 2019, 3:04 AM UTC

He should’ve counted the impacts of the open source software instead of the number of it. Does he think Apache web server with million or billions usage the same as one random open source software he found on GitHub and less than hundreds usage? Further, If he counts all of OSS on github and or sourceforge, he should’ve counted all crappy and abandoned closed software buried in any corporate office.

Re: The Cathedral and the Bizarre

#60

Post by drongoking » Sun, Dec 15, 2019, 3:15 AM UTC

iudqnolq wrote: post #55

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically, he anticipated this objection, which many people beyond the parent poster are making, and answered it in the paragraph that contains: " ... Open source users will admit that a lot of open source is buggy abandonware. However they argue that this really does not matter since some small significant fraction is really quite good and that's the stuff we should use. ... " Finding and dissecting the paragraph t…

As far as I can tell, he makes a weak argument by analogy > This lesser-known fact is masked by the isolated points fallacy. The isolated points fallacy consists in taking the high scoring points on a graph and plotting your line on the basis of them. Hence open source champions wheel out the standard examples of success - Open Office, Wordpress and Red Hat Linux (we'll look at why some of these have succeeded later)…

I don't buy his argument and I think he's confused. Lots of people have released code on github (as have I) so that other people can use it. Lots of it isn't used, so it looks abandoned. Maybe it is. So what? Why is that considered a failure of Open Source?

I think he's applying closed source's rules. A closed source project is a failure if no one uses (ie, buys) it, since it represents a development cost that wasn't compensated. Not so with open source. I don't suffer if no one uses my project, and the existence of my repositories doesn't detract from anyone else's work.